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You’ve spent a career mastering both your craft and the tools it takes to accomplish it. That’s why most finance teams stick to their spreadsheets and static planning methods. However, those old tools and processes can only take you so far. Static planning leaves little time for the strategic, big picture analysis that can be the real game changer for the bottom line, not to mention your journey up the corporate ladder.
Grow the business, grow your career
Start by focusing on where you want to go
If you want your career to advance beyond juggling spreadsheets, you need to play a role in defining strategy and measuring its success. It starts by collaborating with stakeholders and team leaders to understand their business needs. Only then can you deliver the relevant data and insightful analyses that will build trust with business managers and establish your value to the team.
Spreadsheets: a hammer when you need a nail gun
It’s not a matter of choosing between spreadsheets or corporate performance management software. It’s a matter of using the right tool for the job. A hammer is perfect for driving a single nail or for a small project; if you need to roof an entire house, it’s smarter to go with the nail gun. It’s the same with FP&A. Having both spreadsheets and strategic financial resources as your disposal gives you the power and flexibility needed to be most effective. If you limit yourself to just spreadsheets, you'll be ill-equipped to handle complex tasks like building sophisticated models that scale as your business grows or deploying rolling forecasts across an organization.
Be the person with all of the answers
The smartest way to advance your career is to be a trusted partner to non-finance team members and leadership. If you can simplify the numbers so others can take action you'll always have a seat at the table. However, without the right tools it's difficult to provide the strategic financial analysis, data visualization, or targeted reports needed to contribute. Increase your visibility by improving your ability to identify risks, discover areas of opportunity, evaluate what-if scenarios, and communicate the story behind the numbers.
Make your finance processes collaborative, comprehensive, and continuous
By providing accurate, real-time data to business managers, you can create flexible models that allow you to quickly and easily test a range of variables and scenarios. Things like automatic report generation and data visualization make information easier to digest and analyze, while collaborative capabilities allow you to improve visibility and build trust. When you can deliver relevant data and visuals that support better decision-making, you become a more valuable partner to the business, and increase the value of your personal brand.
Software that makes the planning process collaborative, comprehensive, and continuous allows you to engage in what we call "active planning." Benefits of active planning include:
Collaborative
- Engage finance and business owners across the organization with ease of use
- Empower adoption with self-service capabilities
- Spend more time analyzing your model instead of creating it
- Always work with real-time data
- Drag-and-drop report building features
- Have confidence that everyone is working in the same model version
Comprehensive
- Create dashboards that integrate your actuals and plan
- Easily manage models and forecasts across all integrated data sources
- Run flexible what-if analyses
- Access audit trails to see what changed, when, and who did it
- Easily account for multiple currencies, exchange rates, etc.
- Get business insights from real-time data
- Build board reports for senior management
Continuous
- Automate data consolidation from all sources
- Export operational data from GL, payroll, purchasing, etc.
- Collaborate with business partners
- Course-correct with more agility
- Run scenario plans in minutes
- Update reports with one click
- Use flexible modeling that lets you build on the fly and adjust dimensions as needed
When you have these three components, we call it "active planning"
Learn how active planning can help you level up your organization and your career.
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